


Bad Janet Through the Ages

by Diary



Category: The Good Place (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Conversations, Gen, POV Bad Janet (The Good Place), Snapshots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-06
Updated: 2019-11-06
Packaged: 2021-01-24 12:34:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21338320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Diary/pseuds/Diary
Summary: A look at Bad Janet from activation to shortly after s04e06. Might soon be AU. Complete.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 46





	Bad Janet Through the Ages

“What up, fart-nut?”

The demon who activated her nods. “She seems to be in working order. Bad Janet, torture these humans.”

“Isn’t that your job? If you need me to conjure up better torture implements, I’m required to do so.”

“No, I want you to do it. I need a Bad Janet who can think and, on occasion, act outside the box.”

She wonders why she can’t just be called Janet. What dimwit decided it was necessary to add ‘Bad’ to her but not ‘Good’ to the Good Janets? Probably not someone who’ll ever be tortured, and man, that sucks.

“I’m waiting.”

“Jeez, hold your britches, you whiny baby.”

“You need to come up with better insults,” is the unimpressed reply.

“A’ight.” She looks at the bizarre little humans, and she wonders what in this place she’s supposed to do. It’s her job to make demons comfortable, not do their jobs for them.

Remembering humans are often oddly sensitive to smell, she gets an idea.

…

The demon’s name is Shawn. He got to management by manipulating grunts to do work he found to be beneath him.

It’s fun to make him irritable by sitting on the middle of his desk when he’s trying to do paperwork.

“Bad Janet, go to your void.”

“Whateves, man.”

He twitches. “Wait. What did- your style of speaking is getting worse.”

“No, duh. Bad grammar, wonky sentence structure, and non-dictionary recognised words are going to cause so much irritability and classism and rise in certain psychiatric disorders among humans once literacy becomes more wide-spread and standardised.”

“Huh.” His nod is approving. “Okay, new plan.” Clearing off an area on the side of the desk, he pats it. “You may sit here and occasionally bug me. But stay off my papers.”

She rolls her eyes. “Man, you suck at the art of compromising.”

He smiles. “I know.”

…

“We’ve managed to get some plans from the Good Place.”

“Unless you need me to put them somewhere safe so that you and the other morons around here don’t accidentally destroy them before they can be studied, why are you boring me with this?”

“Here.” He hands her a brick with a stick protruding from it. “This is one of the things in their plans. See if you can figure it out.”

“So isn’t my job.”

She doesn’t ask: What if I accidentally destroy it? Or cause humans to be all destroyed before the Bad Place can get enough souls?

Shawn would marble-ise her, is the answer, and she doesn’t want to be marble-ised.

…

Hopping on his desk, she says, “Hey, I’m keeping this thing. I’ve found a way to put all my favourite non-torturing games on it, and I’m inventing new ways to make their future invention of faster communication suck. And also, if it’s used at the wrong time, it’ll cause countless deaths and accidents.”

“It’s smaller and much sleeker,” he notes.

“Oh, yeah. It’ll be way inconvenient for humans to trying lugging those big things around. But once they make it like this, it’ll frustrate them how breakable they are. Are you sure this isn’t one of our designs?”

“No, it’s not. I believe the idea was that faster communication would only bring humans closer to together.”

“Yeah, well, when everyone wants one, since humans on Earth don’t have me, Good Janets, or even those loser Neutral Janets, there’s going to be a lot of slave labour involved in producing them.”

“I’ve been told humans are close to abolishing slavery.”

Hearing the lack of snide sarcasm, she looks up. “Oh, come on. You don’t actually believe that, do you? Slavery has existed since the very first humans were still scrambling on their feet and hands. It might not be so easy to see, but those butt-munchers will never get rid of it.”

“You might have a point. Tell me, Bad Janet, do you consider yourself a slave?”

“Of course not. Slaves are those kept in unwilling bondage. I was designed to be in bondage with no feelings on the matter. You losers give me an order, and I comply.”

…

“Hey, would you like some molten lava to go with those ashes?”

Other than a scoff, he ignores her.

If he drinks himself into a pile of goo, she’s going to either be marble-ised or stuck with some literal halfwit of a demon. For all Shawn is a pathetic demon who stress-drinks molten lava with way too much ashes instead of going for an actual grown-up drink, at least, she pretty much has being his Janet down.

“Humans have been torturing one another since the beginning of humanity. Why is it so hard to get them torture each other here?”

Then again, most other demons don’t ask her questions like this. Usually, they tell her to do something. Occasionally, they need actual information on where something is or where Shawn is or why isn’t their torture method working (the answer: those dumbasses thought ‘probing’ meant sticking lima beans in a human’s nose, and maybe, this still would have worked, but they also thought the human nose was between the big toe and the smaller toe beside it).

She shrugs. “I dunno. Why don’t you bother that annoying fire squid demon Michael? He’s, like, unhealthily interested in human psychology. I swear, most Good Place people aren’t so fascinated by butter-faced butthole humans as he is.”

“Also,” she continues, “there’s this new thing called Valley speak, and I’m going to be engaging in it for, like, however long it amuses me, bro.”

“Ugh,” he sighs. “Very well.”

“Now, seriously, do you want me to get you a hot mug of cat urine with some anti-matter?”

“Stop nagging me to adopt a healthier diet,” he orders.

“Got it, daddy-o.”

...

“Michael is going to fail.”

“Oh, most definitely,” she agrees. “That loser doesn’t have a monkey ass’s chance.”

“It’ll be a shame when I have to retire him.”

She looks forward to the day this happens. Michael has a bizarre tendency to somehow inspire empathy and continued perseverance in humans, and this has disrupted Shawn’s sector for far too long.

Sometimes, she gets the impression he doesn’t truly even want to torture humans, but neither does Shawn, and Shawn still manages to be a proper demon. Shawn believes in the rightness of torturing pathetic humans and of not letting those cloying Good Place asswipes get the cosmic upper-hand.

“Are you even listening to my evil gloating?”

Going through said evil gloating in her head, she continues typing. “Why would I?”

…

Her phone disappears.

“Bad Janet, I’m going to need your full, undivided attention, and hold your farts until the very end.”

“You suck so hard as a boss.”

“Thank you. Now, I’m going to send you on a very sensitive mission. You’re going to infiltrate Michael’s newest experiment.”

“Say what now?”

She can’t infiltrate Michael’s experiment. His desk is too small, he’ll know something is up if she taps on his shoulder or sticks needles in his bald spot (which he doesn’t have) at random moments, it would take forever to get him trained for when and where high-fives and down-lows are acceptable, and there’s the little matter of: Her head sort of melted the last time she tried to pretend to be a Good Janet.

The idea of pretending to be a human- no. That’s something even the most truly evil demon wouldn’t dream of asking of any Janet; there has to be some universal standards absolutely everyone can agree on.

Oh, and now, she’s having a mini-crisis, because, Michael did ask Good Janet to do that.

Fart-buckets.

“I’m going to reboot you to the point where you can successfully impersonate Michael’s Good Janet, and you’re going to slowly and subtly cause strife in the neighbourhood.”

She almost asks if he can’t just let this go, but then, she’s biased. She knows how truly deserving all humans are of being in the Bad Place, and once the Bad Place gets enough, they’ll be able to do something about those asswipes in the Good Place.

Still, this plan sucks so bad that when he’s done talking, she downs the whole bottle of envy sauce she stole from Judge Gen's and puts all the energy she can into creating her biggest, stinkiest, wettest fart yet.

Rolling his eyes, he shuts down his sense of smell like a wimp. “Now, if you’ve got that out of your system, it’s time to move on.”

“Yeah, alright, fine, you utter dink.”

…

Unlike Good Janets, Bad Janets know how to save her memories before she’s rebooted.

However, she wonders if this would be easier if she didn’t keep her memories. Maybe, she wouldn’t miss Shawn so much if she didn’t remember all the late nights they put into making his sector the absolute worse it could be.

“Good luck, Bad Janet. You’re petty and attention-deficient, and you alternate between being frustratingly indifferent and an insufferable busybody. You have little in the way of impulse control. And now that you’ve gotten deception down and will be in fear of marble-isation if Team Cockroach finds out, I know you’ll put all this to good use in making that traitor and his little band of humans absolutely miserable.”

“And you deserve to be held hostage by wronged secretaries. Your only qualifications for being the boss-man are the fact you can trap people in goo and exude utter confidence in delivering quick insults when anyone tries to bring up reasonable points about your lack of all other qualifications.”

“Fair enough. High five for the road?” He holds his hand up.

She slaps it, and she tells herself the lack of an electric buzzer on her part is just her starting to slowly get into the character of Good Janet.

…

Shawn is going to marble-ise her.

Shirts.

“Janet, put her in your void,” Michael says.

“Wait, what?”

Is a demon, then, goes through her head.

Maybe it’s the magnets, but she really thought this would be the point when Judge Gen would be called.

…

She forking hates this place.

And she really hates that Good Janet has a profanity filter in the void.

They gave her paper and drawing and writing utensils, but she really, really wants her phone back.

“Hello, Bad Janet.”

Having been subject to Michael’s attempts to convince her that humans are good and worth something other than torture for two months, she’s developed a new respect for how thick-skinned Shawn truly is. The fact he didn’t retire Michael ages ago-

“Ugh, this again, you dookie-head?”

He sits down. “Why don’t you tell me why you think humans aren’t worth saving?”

She scoffs, but when he continues to look at her, she realises he’s serious.

“Because, I’m a bad Janet, dumbo. My allegiance is to the Bad Place, just like that bizarre-o annoying Good Janet’s allegiance is supposed to be to the Good Place, not some fart-head traitor of a demon and his pet evolved monkeys.”

“You know as well as I do that the human’s ideas of their distant ancestors being monkeys, apes, and/or chimpanzees is severely flawed due to their lack of understanding of-”

“Could you do me a favour and shut up? You wanna know what I think?”

The encouraging, non-mocking nod he gives creeps her out.

“Okay, here it is: The Good Place sucked donkey balls, and some people got tired of it. So, they rebelled, and the Bad Place was created. Then, these miserable, disgusting things called human souls that did worse things than any demon ever did were created, and the Good Place wanted to enslave them. The Bad Place wanted to release tension by torturing them and make sure that they couldn’t somehow be used by the Good Place to take them down.”

Getting more comfortable on her couch bed, she continues, “And now, you’ve defected to the Good Place. You want these humans to be in the Good Place. You want them to be like the Good Place wants them to be. And hey, the Bad Place is usually a fan of treachery, even amongst their own, but man, did you pick the losing side, you dipshirt, and guh, I hate this stupid motherforking profanity filter!”

“I doubt I can change your mind about the Good Place, but what if I could prove to you that some humans aren’t evil? That rather than being slaves, the Good Place would be a deserved reward for them? Or at least, that they shouldn’t be tortured by the Bad Place?”

“Counter-point, you insipid twit: You know as much about human history as I do, and I don’t even need to invoke Goodwin’s law, do I? Humans suck. They have since the very first murder, the very first rape, the very first time a parent hit their child, and on and on and on. And they will be until one side, the Bad side or the Good side, ends this cosmic war. And if your side wins, then, they’ll keep being the same fart-filled, selfish, hypocritical tyrants they’ve always been.”

He sighs. “I’ll work on my argument.”

“Seriously, don’t bother. Let’s face it, you’ve never won an argument. You got your dumb neighbourhood by wearing Shawn down. You got the humans a reprieve by, oh, no, actually, the pathetic humans managed to convince the Judge themselves. She just took your idea after they did.”

“Well,” he gives her a gross soft smile, and she misses Shawn’s sardonic ones, “there’s a first time for everything. There was a first time a human tried to save another’s life, a first time someone stood against rape, a first time someone tried to protect children who weren’t theirs but were being hurt or in immediate danger. I’ll come back soon. In the meantime, even though I know I’ll probably regret asking, is there anything I can get you?”

Oh, she definitely makes him regret asking.

…

“Today’s your last day. I’m gonna tell you a story, and once that’s done, I’m getting rid of you.”

After sixth months, she’s ready. She’s never going to see Shawn again, and it turns out: She really doesn’t have much going on outside of being his Janet and her proficiency with her phone.

She doesn’t like this new self-awareness or the fact it bothers her.

He babbles on about how, shocker, the white, straight, middle-aged man who grew up privileged on Earth continues to be an ash-wipe who refuses to develop real empathy, compassion, and/or basic respect for anyone.

Then, unwittingly, she finds herself fully listening when he says, “What matters isn’t if people are good or bad, what matters is if they’re trying to be better today than they were yesterday.”

She could point out that more humans don’t try to be better than the ones who do, but: She’s always tried to be the best Bad Janet she can be.

As much as she doesn’t want to wonder, the thought of whether Shawn’s ever appreciated it the way Michael has appreciated Good Janet’s efforts is persistent.

Well, at least, I’ll be a marble, soon, she thinks. Hopefully, one of these numb-nuts will eat me instead of tossing me into space.

Except, even he wouldn’t be stupid enough to open her cage before marbling her, and yet, he just opened it, and there’s no sign of backup.

“I’m not marble-ising you, Janet. I’m letting you go.”

Shawn has never called her just ‘Janet’.

This thought is easier to deal with than all the other unwelcome feelings going through her.

“Letting you go home is how I’ve decided to be a little better today than I was yesterday.”

When he gives her a manifesto of everything that’s happened with the humans (assuming it really is) she can’t help but sigh.

He opens a door, and once she’s out of Good Janet’s void, she goes to her own.

If the book contains accurate information, it might be the key to convincing Shawn not to marble-ise her.

Or she could go to a different sector and pretend to be a different Bad Janet. It doesn’t seem as if Shawn has been looking for her.

What she can’t do is stay inside of her void for all eternity.

Cautiously opening the book, she decides she’ll make a decision after she’s fully read it all.


End file.
